The month of Erindale is now slated to continue into Canadian Thanksgiving, so you have a few more weeks of updates to look forward to! We’re really hunkering down at Empire Avenue HQ and we’re examining everything we’ve learned in the last six months to create a better site for the future.

Public Profiles

We have now enabled public profiles, which allow you to show off some of your Empire Avenue profile elements to others, even if they don’t have an account. Whether you’re logged in or not, feel free to go to my Public Profile to see how this looks. For all accounts created before September 21, 2010, your public profile has been DISABLED by default. Accounts created after today will have the bare minimum displayed as a public profile. You may control what information you share and whether you even want to have a public profile in your Privacy Settings.

Search

We rolled out a new search page over the past weekend. You might note that you can pretty much type in anything into the field and it will give you results based on relevance, which you can then narrow by the location folks logged in, your lists, and more. Try it out, and let us know what you think. We’ll be improving the search, its indexing and how it looks at real-time content to help you discover new, relevant connections.

Trades

Not every feature we’ve put in has been successful or used widely. Some have just overly complicated the site. As of Tuesday, September 28th, 2010, we will disable the ability to trade shares in others – that’s the specific “trade” function, not buying and selling, which will remain, of course. Trades accounted for less than half a percent of transactions, added unneeded complexity, and didn’t add much to the site. However, we are leaving the API calls. We believe that a third party application developer might come up with a very interesting App using the ability to trade shares between Influencers. For now, however, you will not be able to register or monitor trades from within Empire Avenue’s Web Site.

In the past two weeks we’ve also rolled out the following smaller tweaks:

a. navigation from the main EA Home and other pages
b. when you click on a hashtag, interest or brand you can narrow the top influencers to those who are in your locality
c. the achievements page is a bit easier to navigate with categories

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10 Comments

The direct person to person trading wasn’t adding value because it was very difficult to access as well as redundant. The only way to access it was through the buy or sell screen and it’s not clear whether the 5% trade tax applies. Make trade listing easily accessible and and not taxed and trading could take off. However, it’s still a major disadvantage to the stock owner because they don’t get paid for the trades.

When I clicked like and posted a comment about the new public profile on my Facebook page, it posted with a YouTube graphic, not an Empire Avenue graphic. Also, the like button on the profile likes Empire Avenue, not my profile, so it’s not useful.

Sad to see the trades being escorted off stage. They had a lot of potential to really add some value to stocks. I think you guys need to re-examine their role and give them another chance, perhaps making them more visible will help. Also the time frame is really short and easy to miss.

Adding a third party app for trades is nice, but it doesn’t exist yet, and if the function is not visible on site, it may go the way of the dodo. yes?

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